Headquarters had confirmed that detail while they were over the Atlantic and that had been their first look at what they hunted. The rest of what little they had on him had been waiting when the wheels touched down.
Seat number had gotten the war room a corresponding passport.
Passport had gotten a name, age, and face.
Other than that, they were running blind.
Nick had been first off the plane, and he’d gotten ahead of target.
Kara had been first to tail him.
If she couldn’t get close enough, she’d hand him over to Juan, who waited on the other side of transfers, and if Juan couldn’t get him there, he’d hand him off to Nick at the connecting departure gate. They’d left Aaron behind in the arrival terminal to account for the possibility of target looping back, and that had left a hole at passport control, which was where target would head if, instead of continuing to the connecting flight to Berlin, he turned Frankfurt into the final destination.
The war room, watching and analyzing airport-security feeds in real time, was supposed to provide that cover, but they’d done a shit job so far.
Transfers was a choke point.
Boarding the connection was a choke point.
Deplaning in Berlin was a choke point.
Target knew they were looking for him, and there was no more chance he’d head to any of those choke points than that he was at gate twenty-four right now.
Passport control was the weak spot.
In a perfect world, digital alerts would start pinging as soon as he handed over his documents, but someone able to disappear the way he had wouldn’t rely on a single passport. The information they had on him was now effectively worthless.
He’d already become someone else.
Kara diverted, following the pictograph signage that would take her through immigration.
Nick said, “Angel, confirm status on gate twenty-four.”
Angel said, “Confirm. Target seated in waiting area.”
Kara’s insides protested.
The confirmation made absolutely no sense. Angel saw what they couldn’t, and yet insisted on sending them where target couldn’t possibly be.
Nick, as if reading her mind, said, “What’s the recognition match?”
Angel said, “No match available.”
This airport was too big, had too many exits to run an effective picket, and now Nick was headed in the opposite direction of where they needed him.
Angel was wrong, and because she was wrong, they’d lose target.
Kara clamped her mouth shut and focused on the crowd. Arguing it out with Nick over open coms would raise an apocalyptic shit storm. This was his call to make.
He was good with people, he understood when facts mattered less than appearance, and he knew they had nothing to gain and everything to lose by ignoring Angel. She listened to him, respected him—well-deserved respect—Kara didn’t begrudge that, though she did begrudge the way a guy would be lauded for saying the exact same things in the exact same ways that earned her a reputation for being rough around the edges and a poor team player.
Nick said, “Kilo, redirect to immigration. Juliet, take my gate.”
Kara was a step ahead of him, already in line, searching for anything familiar, watching bodies and faces in the ebb and flow while stamps thudded into passports and the crowd moved steadily forward.
Juan confirmed approach to connecting departure gate, the flight their target should have been on, the flight they should have been on.
Kara reached the immigration desk.
The official glanced at her, then the photo page.
She’d put on a few pounds since the photo was taken, but she was still brown hair, hazel eyes, wide cheekbones, and skin just dark enough that strangers usually assumed Mexican or Puerto Rican ancestry, and she never bothered to clarify, because those assumptions required less effort than explaining blood quantum.
The official stamped her passport and handed it back.
She continued into the luggage hall, where waiting passengers milled around dozens of carousels, and she meandered between them, knowing she wouldn’t find what she was looking for, searching for the sake of being thorough, and moved on toward customs. She had nothing to declare.
They’d traveled light, but even hauling the one backpack while in pursuit would have made her too obvious, too visible, so she’d left her stuff with Aaron in the arrival terminal. Not that hunting without it ended up mattering in the long run.
In her ear, Nick confirmed his arrival at gate twenty-four.
Ice in his voice said no sign of target.
Silence followed. Angel returned with an update that sent him rushing the crowded corridors ten gates back the way he’d just come, and a minute later she corrected with another change of course that wasted their most critical minutes.
Nick, normally calm, unflappable, said, “Whatever the hell is going on in there, get it fixed, and get it fixed now.”
Angel bit back, and the two of them argued in clipped code-speak.
The tension created anxiety, made Kara want to pull the earpiece out.
Angel wasn’t Nick’s boss, though she often spoke to him as if she was.
Liv Wilson was her real name, and Liv was a politics-playing, ass-kissing ladder climber who’d say one thing to your face and something else entirely in committee meetings, which left work-oriented, non-game-playing people like Kara confused and wary and often looking a little bit crazy. Liv was every girl in high school who’d maintained social status by tormenting the awkward misfit who’d just wanted to be left alone, and she was every adult woman who saw competence in other women as a threat to her own position and who’d sabotage in a hundred petty ways, even if that damaged the team itself.
Kara despised her, but personal feelings had nothing to do with work.
Liv ran headquarters support and had the war room at her disposal—the engineers and analysts, the specialists tied directly into foreign and domestic intelligence and law-enforcement databases—she had front-door access to aggregated consumer data and financial institutions and a worldwide network of Internet-connected cameras and devices, and for anything not willingly shared, her team had backdoor channels to take what they wanted. Liv had the ability to tap information most people didn’t know existed, and they needed her fully vested in the operation, not sabotaging from the back end.
In Kara’s ear, Nick said, “Give me eyes on the connection.”
Angel said, “Boarding in fifteen. No sign of target.”
Kara exited customs without luggage, without even a purse.
Officials, curious, pulled her aside.
She answered their questions with the truth, said she’d rushed ahead of her travel partner to meet a friend and that her stuff was still coming. They nodded her on in a way that would never happen when entering the United States.
Germany was so much more relaxed in that way.
She passed through automatic glass doors for the outside, where fall air already had a winter bite, and she scanned the sidewalk in both directions.
The decision to exit had been a roll of the dice.
Target could have routed for the skyline and hopped terminals, headed for rail transit, or chosen to sit out the hours in a lounge or restaurant, waiting for the storm to pass, but if he was planning to leave and hadn’t already, he’d have to come this way, and it’d be easier to spot him coming through the doors than milling among the crowds inside. Mind searching, she glanced toward the taxi stand. There, her focus snagged like a hangnail on a shag carpet, ripping her out of one hunt and yanking her back for a stomach-churning double take at the woman at the head of the line.
Her hair was black instead of blond.
She wore tight jeans instead of slacks, had on a cropped designer jacket better suited for someone ten years younger, and dragged expensive luggage to round out the look, but there was no mistaking who she was. Of the many possibilities Kara had accounte
d for on this op, running into Emilia Flynn wasn’t one.
Confusion collided with wariness and a hint of protective jealousy.
She had met Emilia twice, both times in a professional capacity, knew her better by reputation than in person, but Emilia wasn’t a person one forgot, unless, of course, that’s what Emilia wanted. At headquarters she was all long legs and sly nods. Gazes shifted when she walked into a room, and starstruck stutters started up in her wake.
She was beautiful, graceful, likable. Everything Kara wasn’t.
Rumor had it Emilia and Nick had been a thing for a while, which wouldn’t have been the least bit surprising. Nick had a lot of women gunning for him.
He was charming. Good looking. Had a bad boy edge about him.
Women were stupid.
Kara had no issue with Emilia personally, not any more than she had with people in general. Emilia wasn’t a fake-laugh, patronizing backstabber, and she wasn’t cruel, just self-centered and indifferent, which was par for the course since Kara registered so low on most people’s attention meter they often forgot they’d met her, but she did have a big issue spotting Emilia right here, right now.
Emilia, like Nick, led a tactical team.
She’d been working for headquarters longer than Nick had.
But where Nick’s team was mostly renditions, Emilia was strictly wet work—liquidating terroristic individuals, the ones who posed too great a threat to national security and were too dangerous to risk putting into the hands of traditional law enforcement—liquidation operations like the one Kara was on now.
Emilia reached for the taxi door.
She stepped a foot off the curb, and in the beat before her body slid into the car, her head ticked up and she looked right at Kara.
It seemed, for a second, that their eyes had met, but no.
Emilia had stared right through her.
And then the door shut and the taxi pulled away from the curb, and Kara stood frozen, caught between two worlds, half of her chasing their target, the other half running the odds of two special units crossing paths in the same time-space junction.
She dug through her pockets, retrieved a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.
She hated the smoke and hated the smell, but she needed the cover.
In her head she saw Emilia again, Emilia in that final glance, wearing a look of terror and death. That was an Emilia she’d never seen before.
Nick’s voice in her ear jolted her back.
Kara scanned the length of the terminal, hunting for any sign of target and searching for the other members of Emilia’s team.
Travelers passed by. Cars and buses came and went.
Her skin prickled with the sensation of being watched, and she strolled to the end of the sidewalk and back again, glancing at her phone like an impatient traveler who’d been left waiting, searching for the source of the disquiet.
She found nothing and dug for another cigarette.
Nick said, “How’s the weather?”
Kara tapped ash into a receptacle. “Gray. Bleak.”
Juan reported in. The departure gate for the Berlin flight had closed.
There’d been no sign of target.
It’d now been forty-five minutes since they’d lost him.
They’d need to adapt and do it quickly.
She’d have said as much if it’d just been Nick on coms.
She stubbed out the cigarette and glanced back toward the taxi stand, toward the glimpse of Emilia she’d caught, and tried to make sense out of what made no sense.
Juan exited the terminal.
Aaron followed fifteen minutes later with his gear and hers.
Nick was the last to make it out.
They were tired, all of them, tired from jet lag and the transatlantic flight, tired from the adrenaline dump that followed the fruitless chase, tired from disappointment and failure. Nick nodded toward a hotel in the near distance.
Kara raised an eyebrow.
“We’re rebooked on an afternoon flight,” he said. “Was the best we could get. Headquarters is pulling resources. Angel thinks we’ve got a lead on where our guy will show up next, and we’ll try to get ahead of him.” Nick heaved a strap over his shoulder. “In the meantime we clean up and get some shut-eye.”
The hotel was a few minutes on foot from the terminal.
Nick headed for the nearest crosswalk. The rest of the team followed him, and Kara followed them, distracted, detached, oblivious to her surroundings, oblivious to anything but the images playing out inside her head.
Somewhere on the dim, foggy periphery, they reached the lobby.
She was aware, vaguely, that Nick checked them in.
Knew it for certain when he stuck a room key in her hand.
Nick paused, took a good look at her face, pointed a finger at Juan and then at her, as if tethering the two of them. “Don’t let kiddo here get lost,” he said.
Kara’s cheeks flushed.
Nick was only half joking.
Her thoughts bolted back into the mental underbrush like terriers after a rat, and this time they caught something.
The guys had come for a shower and sleep.
All she wanted was the Internet connection.
CHAPTER 3
KARA
SHE SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE BED CLOSEST TO THE WINDOW, LAPTOP in front of her, earbuds in her ears. Music drowned out the world, which in this case meant Juan toweling off wet hair and puttering from bedroom to bathroom and back again. She’d offered him first go at the shower, figuring that would get him out of her way faster.
Not that he was in her way, per se. Just that the room—a clean, efficient standard chain affair of bathroom, two beds, and a strip of window ledge that doubled as a desk—had a knee-knockingly small amount of floor area. She felt every nudge, every footstep, and the movement pulled her out of focus, made it harder to grip concepts she could feel and understand on a meta-level and turn them into something articulable.
Juan leaned in behind the computer and waved.
She glanced up.
He gestured toward the window.
She motioned him on ahead.
They’d been working together long enough now that he recognized the signs, knew she’d already started down the rabbit hole and might not surface for hours.
She didn’t need the light, but he never just assumed.
She liked that about him, the politeness. It mattered a whole heck of a lot on days they were cooped up and stir-crazy, and just generally made having another person up in her space far less stressful than it could have been, which was helpful considering this was the way the rooming always went when Angel put them two-in-one the way she had here.
Kara and Nick in separate rooms at Nick’s request because the two of them bunking together inflamed old rumors that refused to die. And Kara and Juan together at Kara’s request because even after eight months of living, working, and breathing as a team, Aaron Jefferson Lewis just couldn’t get with the idea that she was Nick’s number two due to her particular skill set and not some kind of favoritism.
She didn’t hold that ignorance against him.
Anyone who spent more than five minutes with them knew they were close.
She loved Nick—if love was the right word—as much as Nick loved her, and because of that, assumptions they were sleeping together were easy to come by.
They weren’t and never had and probably never would.
Not that the chemistry wasn’t there, and not that they hadn’t discussed it more than once, just that neither of them wanted to risk destroying the friendship if the relationship soured. So he mostly kept his relationships out of sight, and she mostly kept hers off his radar, and that kept everything else on the table, including respect.
Aaron would figure it out eventually.
He was a smart kid. Quick. Funny. A marine sniper who’d more than earned his place. If shit ever met fan, she’d put her life in his hands without a second thought, but h
e was also young and cocky, in the same way a lot of guys were before life-altering mistakes handed humility a two-by-four and an invitation to knock them on their asses. Until then she preferred downtime that wasn’t filled with petty sniping and passive-aggressive humor.
Juan Marino was none of that.
At forty, he was older than Nick, calmer than Aaron, and had seen enough death to live by the rule that no amount of life energy was worth wasting on drama. He wasn’t a friend, exactly—mostly because she wasn’t the type that people wanted to have as a friend—but he rolled with her quirks and gave her space to do her thing, and she was happy to let him do his.
Juan shut the blinds, and the room went dark.
He scooted past her bed and toppled onto his own.
They were rebooked on the four-thirty to Berlin.
Accounting for check-in and security, they had about three hours before they needed to bug out. He’d use the time to sleep. Ideally, she would, too, but with the speed her mind was running, any attempt in that regard would be an exercise in frustration. She’d missed something in that terminal.
It had been fog of war, heat of the moment.
She needed to go back and see.
She cranked up the music, set the secure line, and patched in.
She didn’t have the bandwidth to pull all the data that’d be waiting now, but ten minutes of footage from the three cameras she’d noted right after target had vanished should get her what she wanted. She located target’s primary file.
Front matter that had been empty now had a high-res scan of his passport.
The photo stopped her before she even got started.
She zoomed in until his face filled the screen.
There was enough familiarity to say that possibly, maybe, this was the face she’d seen in those airport corridors, but not enough that she’d have argued it with any certainty. She clicked through to the file itself.
The war room had added information while her team was over the ocean, including a short, lightly redacted summary of the SIGINT and HUMINT that had pointed headquarters to him, all of it Russian sourced.
Liars' Legacy Page 2
